Tag Archives: Top Five

In mere days, 2017 will have left us, and in its wake, there was a glut of fantastic games that graced our various consoles and electronic devices. Being that I tend to focus more on old-school games and more cost-effective options than new releases tend to lend themselves to, my experiences with games that were released in 2017 are slim. I did still manage to play a few great games that were actually released this year.

Most of my criteria for the games that I added on to this list were simply that they were released within the year and that I had played enough of them to really formulate a solid opinion on them. Some games that didn’t make the cut I’ve been enjoying but I’m still cutting my teeth on- Nintendo’s Super Mario Odyssey and Deep End Games’ Perception being two notable titles that are very promising- and a lot of games I completed this year are a year or two off- Night School Studio’s Oxenfree comes to mind. Honestly, if you’re looking for recommendations of games outside of the past year? I’m a wealth of information and offerings.

What did I manage to play from this year, though, that has stuck with me and made some kind of impact? After thinking thoroughly through my playlist over the past twelve months and sequencing them by relevance- well, I’m just impressed by people being able to work out top 10 lists without endless agonizing.

Now, to add to the top lists of the year of 2017- here is my list of my completely subjective and biased top five games from the year (and one honorable mention) for your consideration and entertainment!

(Oh, and as an added note, while I try to skip over spoilers as much as possible since I’ll be writing a bit more about some of these in upcoming posts, there very well may be spoilers. As vague or minute as they might be, I’d rather warn my readers than not!)

Like this:

I am a prolific gamer of the RPG genre. I started young with tabletopping Dungeons & Dragons with some neighborhood kids. These same neighborhood kids had an SNES, and when I went over for our game one day, I noticed one playing this crazy looking game on his system, with stats and equipment and little characters running around before the screen changed and he entered a fight.

It turns out he was playing Final Fantasy III (what we nowadays know as Final Fantasy VI), and I was blown away by the idea of being able to play a game like this. I became like a man possessed trying to figure out how to get one of these RPG videogames in my own life.

I considered an article today on five games that had heavy influence on my gaming career, and started putting caveats in place. I first decided I would not post about a game that I have previously posted about before (which excluded Xenogearsfrom my lineup). No more than one game per series, no matter how many of them I’d consider influential to me. I also decided to post one RPG per system, another major hurdle. When I began writing out the list and realized that three out of five of the games were RPGs already, I figured I may as well make the jump to fully discussing the genre, and could write about those other games separately. With all of that in place, I still had trouble paring the list down to what I did.

So now, I present to you, in no particular order: Five RPGs that have truly shaped me as a gamer. I must warn you that I’ll be discussing some things that may reveal spoilers. They are all a bit older as far as games go, but I thought it only fair to include the warning.